These Men Might Save Your Life

Last winter, the men whofollow made national headlines with two rescue missions atop Oregon's tallest peak, Mount Hood. Now gearing up for another season of saving lost climbers, they take a break on their home turf to look back on a tough year, and we do our best to keep them warm.

Rising 11,239 feet above sea level, Mount Hood is Oregon's highest peak and a destination for ten thousand climbers and hikers every year. Most of them make it up and down the mountain without so much as a cramp. Others falter, and when they go missing, it's usually the volunteers of Portland Mountain Rescue who take time off from their day jobs, lace up their boots, and head on up after them.

You might've already heard of them. Twice in the past year -- once in February and once in December -- the men and women of PMR were big news. Their February rescue, which involved three lost climbers on the mountain's south side, was completed within twenty-eight hours, the subjects located safe and sound. Their December search on the north side, however, went from bad to worse as calamitous weather kept them off the mountain in full force for nearly a week. The body of one climber has been recovered; the bodies of the other two are still missing.

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The men on the following pages are just a few of the rescuers involved in those missions. Their motivation seems simple enough -- they just want to help people -- but one gets the sense that maybe there's more to it. That maybe they're trying to make Mount Hood safe and accessible to everyone, themselves included. That maybe when rescuer Kurt Pothast says, "We risk a lot to save a lot," he's not just talking about lost climbers. That maybe he's talking about saving not just lives but a way of life.

"Our alert system does a number of things: It pages you, it e-mails you, it calls all your phone numbers. On the December call-out, we didn't know a whole lot except that three climbers were missing. We knew it was not a good time of the year and it was not a good side of the mountain. I knew that it was the worst storm I had ever seen on the mountain."

"I was there when we first got word of the December mission. At first, we were thinking, Oh, they're just missing somewhere on the north side. If anything, we'll go the next day and find them down low. I then took one look up at the mountain and just gulped."

"The only thing you ever really think about is, What if it were me? I would want to know that the PMR guys are out there willing to do whatever it takes to find me. Because sometimes it's just fate. People get in over their heads."

"A lot of newspapers talk about how we risked our lives in the search, and it's kind of demeaning to us. It's hard on our families when we read that kind of an editorial. We work in a difficult, harsh environment that's very challenging, but that doesn't mean we risk our lives."

"I've been rescued off of Mount Hood before -- back in 1999, when a huge rock slide came down and crushed my climbing partner's pelvis. When I rescue someone today, I know what they've been through, and I know that they've been waiting a long time or for what feels like a really long time. It's all quiet, and you're just waiting for someone to come and get you."

"More often than not, it starts in the middle of the night with a page from the sheriff's department. They're usually the first party that gets notified. Someone will call 911, and they'll be connected with the sheriff, and the sheriff will send out an alert to a certain number of folks in PMR. So we're notified, and we'll crawl out of bed, throw our stuff in the car, and head for the mountain."

"When you're searching in whiteout conditions, anything you see looks like it's moving, because your equilibrium is kind of screwed up. So as we were going up on the February mission, we thought we saw people and dogs around us, but it was just rocks. We were hallucinating."

"In February, I was on the team that found our live subjects. When we entered the field, it was still dark and we didn't know precisely where they were. Our goal was to head out to the approximate area. We had no tracks to follow, and we were all spread out in a safety space when Bob Alexander made visual contact. He said, 'I think we've got 'em over here,' and he's pulling the tarp up and talking to 'em. The first words from the gentleman were, 'We're all here. We're all okay.'"